Obama also kinda gave off an "elitist" vibe tbh. Not as much as Romney, but maybe more than McCain.
Also IDK if I'd call McGovern or even Humphrey more "elitist" than Nixon in any meaningful sense.
I get what you're saying but I still think "charisma" is the big factor in this period more than anything else. Even then, Nixon is kind of an exception. And in 1988, neither candidate was charismatic.
Obama seemed more “personally elitist” than McCain (wow, we’ve gotten into really strange terms here, lol), but his campaign/person certainly wasn’t. I mean, the GOP literally couldn’t get away from the image of “pro-business party causes Great Recession” no matter how hard they tried, and Obama definitely leaned into it.
Obama was a constitutional law professor, so he had a problem of speaking to a crowd like he was lecturing his students.
